UPDATE - April 28!

We have a trailer! Thank you to all our contributors for making this happen!

UPDATE!

We have reached our funding goal which covered production costs!  Further funds will go into post-production and distribution costs, helping this film be the best it can be and making sure it is seen!  Let's keep the momentum going!

Here are some stills from the film, we're getting ready to start editing!

Before Anything You Say is a captivating drama filming this fall in Winnipeg, MB written by Deborah Schnitzer and directed by Shelagh Carter (award-winning director of Passionflower) with cinematography by the award-winning Ousama Rawi (The Tudors, Borgia).  Weaving through Paris and Winnipeg, this film follows a married couple as they struggle to maintain their love and marriage even as a life-altering decision threatens to tear them apart.

When Isobel’s husband Jack announces his intent to pursue a job that would require him to live in Bangkok for five years working against human trafficking, he assumes she will follow, leaving her life and career behind.  However, Isobel is not prepared to follow blindly.  Hurt and feeling misunderstood by one another, they attempt to reconcile their lives and love in Paris and in their dream home in Winnipeg.   Both struggle with a desire to care for others without being aware of their inability to care for each other.  They refuse to give up despite themselves and despite the world around them.

The world of Before Anything You Say isn’t absurd or meaningless; it’s one that hides its profoundest meaning in plain sight. To reveal this paradox, a succinct improvisational approach will be used during the rehearsal process with the two lead actors, Darcy Fehr and Kristen Harris. This process will tighten and intensify the dialogue and evoke truthful behaviour. The improvisational work will be recorded and the revised script established. Related improvisational techniques will involve working with the actors on location to discover the potential for silence and the blocking of scenes.

With understated shifts in perspective, the camera can capture a world that is subtly yet deeply out of joint. Visual dislocation can be more radical, and the emotional break even more irreparable.  That tension in all its variations is true to the competing claims within the characters themselves:  they condemn exploitation and yet indulge it; they care for and do not care for each other; they want to love— they do not want to love.

In the fall of 2013 filmmaker Shelagh Carter found herself suddenly being asked to live in two worlds when her husband announced he had become the Chief Inspector for Fire and Safety of the Accord in Bangladesh, and expected her to move to Dhaka with him for five years.  Under the duress of the two worlds she was to inhabit, she wondered how she could continue to be a filmmaker and translate this challenge into art.  She reached out to her long-time collaborator, Deborah Schnitzer.  Together they explored this experience and uncovered themes and correlative stories they had read and shared about the struggle to love, express that love, and how it might erode over time.

The result was an experimental narrative feature film script with vivid and intricate imagery that caught the eye of renowned cinematographer Ousama Rawi. Ousama is most known for his beautiful work on The Tudors for which he won an Emmy Award, two Gemini Awards, and four CSC Awards.  Shelagh and Ousama first worked together on the short film One Night and are excited to work together again on this innovative feature project.

Shelagh, Deborah, Ousama and the rest of the team are extremely passionate about getting this beautiful film made, and with your support we can!

   Director:

Shelagh Carter is a Lifetime Member of The Actors Studio as an Actress and Director, a Professor of Theatre and Film at the University of Winnipeg and a graduate of the Canadian Film Centre’s Directors Lab in Toronto.  During the past ten years Shelagh has directed seven short films and one feature film.  Night Travellers, her third short film, was a National Screen Institute Drama Prizewinner in 2007. Her award winning 35 mm short, One Night, was filmed as part of the Canadian Film Centre’s Short Dramatic Film 2009 series, and screened at several international film festivals. She has also won world festival recognition with her experimental narrative short films Canoe, Rifting/Blue and Is It My Turn. Shelagh’s first feature film, Passionflower also won considerable film festival attention and honors while screening at 10 film festivals worldwide.

   Writer:

   Cinematographer: